Costa Rica Project (Matapalo, Costa Rica)

Overview:

In the second year of the World House Project, the IwB began a partnership with Costa Rican Ministries of Culture and Housing. The project addressed rural renewal in the developing Guanacaste region. Focusing on the town of Matapalo, a small but fast-changing municipality, the project explored ways to balance the impact of global tourism on local communities.

The IwB designed a 60 square metre green, social housing prototype unit, a process for co-creating vibrant sustainable public village squares and a regional plan linking resorts with the villages that surround them into a more holistic tourist ecosystem. The project also touched on social justice issues of affordable and dignified housing for migrant workers building resorts and green infrastructure such as biogardens in rural areas.

Goals:

To deliver viable and sustainable housing solutions to the communities of the Guanacaste region in Costa Rica, a quickly changing, urbanizing and globalizing area.
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Matapalo. A hotspot in the escalating collision between the global and local. It’s here and in thousands of places like it that we see the interconnectedness of our world.  

When things change in Guanacaste, they change fast. Once a series of ranching communities that seemed doomed to die out, Guanacaste is now a global investment hotspot. Along the roads of the Guanacastan coast, new resorts multiply and it’s fast becoming a second home and a favourite retirement spot for foreigners.

For the local inhabitants, the effects of the economic boom are mixed. Like many coastal regions around the world, Guanacaste is seeing the growth of densely urbanized strips along the coast, with flourishing economies that are scarcely connected to the hinterland. Populations now fluctuate with the seasons, swelled by migrant workforce and tourism. The investment is reinvigorating what were dying communities, bringing new opportunities to the service sector and making it possible for people to find work locally.

On the other hand, rampant commercial and tourist sprawl has meant serious social and environmental inequalities and problems. For instance, one formally idyllic beach community had to close down its beach due to excessive pollution. Mass tourism brings opportunity but also dramatic changes to the local landscape and culture. Distinct tensions exist between globalized and local cultures in the Guanacaste region. Local communities are seeking ways to come to terms with these changes.

In year 2 of the World House Project, the IwB began a project to address these issues in Costa Rica. The project was spurred by the work of an IwB student and native Costa Rican, Giorgiana Penon, who uncovered an opportunity in her homeland. Penon’s initiative became a proposal for rural renewal in the developing Guanacaste region on behalf of the Costa Rican Ministries of Culture and Housing.

The Government of Costa Rica asked the Iwb to create models for sustainable communities in the new investment hotspot of Guanacaste. Matapalo, a small town in western Guanacaste, served as a case study community within the Reserva Conchal catchment areas. A former agricultural centre, the town was being overtaken by tourism development, driving living costs up and displacing locals. Matapalo, like other communities in the area, at the time had no development plan and faced growing problems on many fronts.

Several proposals were developed by the IwB to address the changing needs of the Guanacaste communities, these include:

• A green social housing prototype for rural areas that could be implemented to meet the needs of the growing population and accommodate local families while providing temporary accommodation to migrant workers. The housing prototype is explored in the World House Costa Rica Project Book.
• a model collaborative process for renewing public spaces and village squares in small villages in the region, explored in the Plaza de Matapalo book
• a regional plan balancing tourist resorts and their surrounding villages into a more coherent and exciting tourist experience.

The solutions purposed were economically, culturally and environmentally suitable for the region, helping the Costa Rican Ministries envision better rural development and renewal for the future of the Guanacaste region.

Project Outcome/Findings:

Using the case study of Matapalo, an extensive proposal for the Matapalo Town Square was developed that is outlined in the Plaza de Matapalo: The World House Project Costa Rica book. The proposal offered a new vision for co-creating a revitalized town square in Matapalo that includes a complete redesign of the square that serves the needs of both residents and visitors that includes a new market shelter and carts, a new bus shelter, landscape redesign using diverse local plants, a rainwater collection system for irrigation and stormwater management, an event board, a playground as well as many other improvements. Developed using the World House Matrix, the plan levers a systems approach and community engagement to develop public spaces incrementally over time.

The IwB also developed a proposal for an interactive design tool called the Dashboard, outlined in the Dashboard IwB publication. The Dashboard was made to navigate design projects by organizing and filtering information. It is a useful tool when presented with complex design challenges. The Dashboard layers and overlaps information to make it easier to grasp the complexity of the problems at hand, helping to orient, classify, evaluate, and revise a project to generate better design solutions by developing a dialogue between designer and client on the nature if the design collaboration.

The Dashboard was used to approach the Matapalo Town Square Project and other proposed projects for Guanacaste like investigating ways to create ecotourism in the Guanacaste region. It provided a framework to address multiple clients and different levels of interaction, while demonstrating sensitivity to local cultures and communities.

All the projects proposed by the IwB for Matapalo and its surrounding Guanacastan communities, dealt with the idea of interzones, spaces that both tourism and local communities can share and benefit from. These include but are not limited to natural, cultural, infrastructural, and economic interzones. The IwB’s work in Costa Rica also verified the collaborative and co-learning principles of the IwB illustrating that a student initiative could become one of the Institute’s major curriculum projects.

On the whole, the Costa Rican project was about trying to find the balance in power relations in Matapalo and Guanacaste as a whole. In Costa Rica, there are many inequalities and a delicate balance between local and global forces. Understanding power relationships in Matapalo and Guanacaste meant not trying to decipher whether the area is more local or global, but acknowledging the locally and globally enforced inequalities and forces that have shaped it, and trying to find a balance of power that derives benefits at the local and global level. The project resulted in a deep commitment by the IwB to the principle of glocalism.

In Matapalo, global tourism helped to alleviate poverty by bringing investment to the area, but it also brought negative effects and heightened the wealth disparity between locals and foreigners. For instance, the new tourist resorts gave new employment opportunities, but it also monopolized the town’s water resources. Thus, global investment does not necessarily improve local communities if there is no synergy between the needs of local and foreign needs. The concept of ‘glocalism’ looks to resolve the shortsightedness of global investment and by asking how does the global help the local? And how does the local enhance the global?

2007-2008 Costa Rica Year Highlights:

December 2007

This charrette brought together students from the IwB and the Veritas University architectural program to create solutions for the World House Costa Rica Project. Presentations from both schools on social housing unit design preceded the charrette and served as a basis for further investigation.

Project Credits:
Costa Rican Ministries of Culture and Housing
IwB cohort 2008-2009

Project Tags:
Costa Rica, Matapalo, town square revitalization, Dashboard

Photo Credits:
IwB cohort 2008-2009